Ian Chadband, in Majorca, hears the master plan of Team Sky, under Sir Dave
Brailsford, to become the world’s most admired sports team through a mix of
innovation and clever planning.

Copy the bestSir Dave Brailsford, Team Sky’s principal, says he sees outfits such as football’s Barcelona and Formula One’s McLaren as being model teams worth emulating yet believes that Sky can top them. “We want to be the world’s most admired sports team. If you’re going to be audacious, get an audacious goal. Reach for the stars, you might get to the moon then,” he says at the team’s Majorcan winter base.

It is the Jose Mourinho way; putting out a bold statement and challenging yourself to deliver. What would this dream team look like?

“It would be the best performing, with the most engaged fans. Given the commercial nature of the sport, it would have the most satisfied partners. And, most important, it would have to be recognised as clean.”

Target success

Sky had a sensational 2012, headed by fulfilling their central target of winning the Tour de France, with Bradley Wiggins obliging and Chris Froome runner-up. Now, the stakes are raised again.

They have effectively set up three projects: one to pilot Wiggins to the Giro d’Italia crown, another to lead Froome to the Tour de France title and a third to deliver success in one-day classics. Tim Kerrison, the head of performance support, persuaded Wiggins he could be strong in both the Giro and the Tour.

“We quite like people telling us things can’t be done,” says Kerrison. “In the five weeks between events, we’ll have total control to manage workload and recovery. Brad will be ready.

“Key riders will now have a little less racing which will allow themselves time for significant training blocks through the season.”

Sky have invested increasingly in training camps, in Majorca and at altitude in Tenerife. A permanent team headquarters will also open this summer in Nice, the most convenient location for many of their riders.

Continuous performance analysis

Sky’s most crucial performance planning and coaching tools are the power meters which measure everything the riders do in training and racing, and the subsequent collection and analysis of that information. With riders of 18 different nationalities living in 24 different countries, this is the best way for coaches to bring a scattered team together and plan training most efficiently.

The data, taken over months, enables the team to plot two 'power curve’ graphs for each rider, a 'green line’ charting their actual power over periods between five seconds and three hours and an ideal 'red line’ curve they should aspire to for specific competitions. Brailsford says riders were initially resistant, thinking downloading the data was a chore “and like Big Brother” but now that they understood its benefits in tailoring their training, more than 95 per cent adhered to the scheme.

The information, for instance, helped Kerrison discover that Wiggins’s explosive power, which he had wrongly assumed would be fantastic from his track background, needed serious work.

Leave no room for doping doubt

This is critical. Team Sky has to be clean. And must be seen to be clean. Kerrison admits that he was left “really frustrated and angry” by cynical reaction to Sky’s stunning successes in 2012.

The team’s image has not been helped by publicity surrounding Geert Leinders, the former Team Sky doctor being investigated for doping practices when at a Dutch team.

“Remarkable performance does not necessarily correlate with doping,” Kerrison says. “After Lance Armstrong’s interview, I can understand why people think they’ve been let down time and again. So our role is to open our doors to the world, to be as transparent and open as we can about the way we’re doing things.”

Though it is not primarily an anti-doping tool, Sky believe their exhaustive performance analysis of their riders would alert them best to any completely surprising performance improvements which merited suspicion.

“We’re continually refining our anti-doping strategies in the way we recruit riders, education and the team culture,” says Kerrison, while Brailsford is adamant he would rather employ a rider with the “right attitude and behaviour” than someone he felt he could not wholly trust.

Embrace outside thinking

It is not enough to tap the best knowledge from within the sport. Brailsford also has regular meetings with key players in other sporting fields, as they attempt to pool their expertise in different areas which may help the principal discover some of his beloved “marginal gains” that may make the difference between good cyclists and winning cyclists.

Kerrison is probably Sky’s quietest and deadliest weapon. The young Australian sports scientist, who came from an Olympic rowing and swimming background, has brought new coaching techniques, ideas and number-crunching wizardry into cycling.

Brailsford thinks “there is a genius” to the way he takes the tremendously complex slog of monitoring riders yet is able to present it in a simple, easy to digest way to them which actually motivates.

Use Wiggins inspiration

Kerrison knew that the only way he could win over the sceptics who would not easily buy into the idea of lessons from swimming being transferred to cycling was if he could get key riders on board. “Brad Wiggins bought into it and became a role model for everyone else because they saw his success,” says Kerrison. Wiggo is still key to Sky’s plans because of his inspirational and relentless work ethic. In Majorca, they say he is training like a demon.